cindy suopis retires

Thursday, August 31, 2017

After fifteen years of service to UWW and over three decades working in the fields of business and health communication, our beloved Cindy Suopis has retired.

Born and raised in Ohio, Cindy was the first in her family to graduate from college. She earned her BS in Journalism from Bowling Green University, and then went on to earn her MBA from American International College in Springfield, MA, her MA in Health Communication from Emerson College and the Tufts School of Medicine, and her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

She worked in a wide range of fields before coming to UWW, including human resources, hospital administration, health education, organizational consulting, journalism, public relations, strategic planning, management, grant writing and business process improvement. She also served as an officer in the U.S. Navy where her duties included speech writing, magazine editing, recruiting, public affairs, and drug/alcohol counseling.

Over her fifteen years as a faculty advisor, Cindy has taught, advised and celebrated with hundreds of students. “My dream job is to be tour guide,” she said. “Whenever students ask me for advice on any aspect of their degree I feel as though my dream job came true.”She also served as the director of UWW during a critical period in the program’s history, and guided the program towards fiscal sustainability. In addition to her role at UWW, Cindy taught on-campus classes through the UMass Department of Communication and serves on the Northampton, MA Board of Health.

When asked to write about her personal interests for the website, she wrote the following, “Installation art, European cities, Urban life, politics, the Farm to Table movement, anything Beyonce says or does, media representations of culture, tenacity of adult students, how children learn, ocean swimming, catching raindrops and snowflakes with my granddaughter and cooking the perfect paella with Najda Salerno-Sonnenberg playing the violin in the background.”

In her retirement, Cindy will continue teaching Experiential Reflections on Health for UWW, spend more time with friends and family and work in the Decision Training Program with inmates at the Hampshire County Correction Facility in Northampton Massachusetts.